


Scrolling By

by monanotlisa



Category: Pillars of Eternity
Genre: Background Femslash, Crack, Crack Treated Seriously, F/F, Fluff and Crack, Gen, Mostly Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-13
Updated: 2018-09-13
Packaged: 2019-07-11 21:54:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,539
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15981281
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/monanotlisa/pseuds/monanotlisa
Summary: Once upon a time there wasa video game series. Then there wasa two-panel tumblr comic strip. Now there is this story.It's much less meta than the above indicates.





	Scrolling By

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [What if Edér is smart enough to use scrolls?](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/417371) by tomato enchanter. 



> Spoilers for _Pillars of Eternity_ including all of Deadfire.
> 
> The rating's just for the tiny smidgen of blasphemy and bestiality. 
> 
> Do check the work that inspired this; you will not regret it.

“Oh,” I said.

“Oink,” the piglet said. It looked up at me with a keen, green gaze. Its skin was golden with brown stripes, like one of those tigers in tomes about the jungles of Old Valia. 

There was a second piglet, all hairy and blue, scratching its back with relish against the corner of the chair. The third, white with black markings on the top of its head, sulked on the table, legs folded primly. A fourth piglet was was cheerfully rolling back and forth in a puddle of water that had dripped to the floor; that one was a different shade of blue and had luminescent patches and a tuft of glowing curls. The fifth piglet, a tan one with black spots, basked in Edér’s arms. 

Edér wore a guilty expression but clearly wasn’t feeling _too_ guilty, seeing as he didn’t stop cuddling the tan pig for more than a polite second. Only when I looked around could I see Cosmo, Pig Number One relegated to being the sixth: a glowing ball of dismay hiding in a crate in the corner. Poor space pig; there were really to many members of its original species around.

Sometimes it pained me to be so fed up with the gods that I couldn’t even throw up my hands and invoke one of their damn lot.

“Edér. What. Is. This?”

Edér made sure to scratch his piglet’s little head in a thoughtful fashion before answering. “Matter of fact, ran a little experiment. Best to be prepared for the next big mess.”

I glanced down at the striped piglet that rubbed less than surreptitiously against my right leg. “Prepared with pigs.”

“I think Maia wants to be picked up,” Edér said helpfully, only not.

Without breaking eye contact with Edér I scooped Maia up in my arms. She grunted cheerfully, and tried to land a wet piggie smooch on my cheek. Unfortunately for me, if not for her, she succeeded. “Who was it that turned our friends, including my girlfriend, into piglets -- no, Tekēhu, I can’t also pick you up.”

The blue pig standing next to me snorted sadly, but then seemed to perk up and bounced over to the hairy one. Serafen in turn dove away neatly and with surprising speed, leading a to a piggie chase around the chair, table, and man sitting there. Who grinned. “Take a guess. First one doesn’t count.”

It was on the tip of my tongue to say _Pallegina_ , because she was the only one who clearly wasn’t piggified. But then I thought of the likelihood of Pal turning her comrades into helpless beasts for fun (or, as Edér put it, “an experiment”), and reconsidered. “Aloth, but something went wrong.” To put not too fine a point on it.

“Close, but no whiteleaf.” 

I blinked. Time to reconsider everything. Both on the table and at Edér's feet was a dusting of black soot. I squinted at it. Scrolls were always consumed by the burning force of their unfurled magic, leaving little more than a faint scent of burning paper in the air. I had seen faint dust whirling in the air before, so scrolls it was. I peered at Edér, who looked pleased. Perhaps at something beyond the pigs. “You. You did this. How?”

Maia chose this moment to squirm closer again, and I held her slightly away from my face. “Babe, no kisses on the mouth right now.” I did however pull her against my (relatively inconsequential) bosom, which seemed to make her happy. Some things never changed.

“Aloth taught me.” Edér tried to look nonchalant and almost did.

My head spun. “Aloth taught you arcane secrets? _When_? When we were chasing a mad animancer? When were freeing a dragon under Neketaka? When we were following pirates across the seas?” 

“Well, if you put it like that…” Edér frowned. “We did it here and there. Might have watched him with his transcriptions back in the Dyrwood, and kept asking.”

My stare must have been a little long, a little incredulous, or both, because Edér lifted his shoulders (and Xoti, who squeaked indignantly). “Hey, we spent a lot of time on that boat of yours. And I guess you weren’t always, you know....” 

“Watching, yes. Hah-hah.” In truth, Edér was pretty funny. Unless he annoyed me.

Speaking of. I glanced at Aloth. Aloth glanced back with the expression of a pig that had found the buttermilk in its trough far too sour this morning. He obviously regretted some of his life choices. What else was new?

What was new, however, was the duration of this spell. Form Of The Helpless Beast lasted only seconds, usually. “Edér, how long have they been pigs?”

“ _Fourteen minutes and twenty-seconds_ ,” came a voice from the doorway. Pallegina leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed but otherwise as relaxed as I’d seen her in a while. She didn’t seem particularly troubled by her friends’ porcine forms. Maybe there was even a glimmer of amusement in her...no, I must have imagined that.

“So you timed it, but you couldn’t have stopped it?” I could hear the plaintive note in my own voice.

“Watcher.” Pallegina gave me what was, at best, an indulgent look. “What is my duty?”

This was a question I had no trouble answering without studying beforehand. “To serve and protect the Vailian Republics.”

“What is not my duty?”

“Herding cats.” I sighed. “Or pigs. Or even just Edér. At least he had the sense to not use a scroll on you.”

“He had the sense to prefer his penis remain attached,” Pal said pensively.

Or that, yes. It solved the riddle of the HOW and WHO, but not quite of the WHAT -- we were at a quarter of an hour into a spell, and that kind of duration had to come from something. Not Edér; he may have been sufficient to start the chain reaction...but not to keep it going. 

“Here, take her.” I quickly handed Maia to Pal. I didn’t even check to see who of the two let out the angry squeak.

Bending down, I rubbed the remnants of the scrolls at Edér's feet between my fingers. They came away smudged, almost oily. More substantial than paper, and somehow more organic. “Parchment,” I murmured, “hide or skin, not paper or plant matter. Edér, what on Eora were these transcribed on?”

He shrugged. “We found a nice stack of shiny parchment in a crate. Crate looked worn enough that no one should’ve cared. And the scrolls basically wrote themselves.”

I was getting that tell-tale itchy feeling behind the bridge of my nose, and Pal too took an interest, judging by the rustle of feathers next to me. She crouched down next to the black dust, and I could see the transparent lid flickering rapidly across her yellow eyes. “Watcher. Do you see the faint glitter in the remnants of those scrolls?”

“Yes,” I said, wondering where she was going with that. “Maybe the paper was treated with translucent crystal to carry more power -- adra ban comes to mind.”

But Pallegina shook her head. “You can’t see it, but I can tell you this isn’t ground-up gemstone. It is fragments of _scales_.”

Scales. On something that was too perfect to not transcribe your scrolls on… I groaned. “Dragon hide. Of course.”

“Of course,” Pal said, and I didn’t have to look at her to know she was looking heavenward. She was a competent metaphysics amateur these days, but she was no student of the arcane...or obscure, in this case. 

I chewed my lip (a bad habit, I know) and looked from her to Edér at his table. “In ancient times slayer-wizards used to skin dragons, tan their hides, and write their spells down on them -- fantastically powerful magic, lasting and transformative in ways that are long forgotten.”

“Don’t see how these ways are forgotten,” Edér said, gently putting Xoti down after a last affable scritch behind the ears. He ambled over to us. “Seeing as you remember them. Not that you aren’t plenty special. But still probably not the only one?”

That wasn’t quite my point, but I suppose he couldn’t know. “There are almost no dragons left, and certainly no kith who knows how to skin and tan its hide. So who or what is behind this?”

Pal ran a hand through her headfeathers, smoothing them. “I think you are on to something there, Watcher.”

I turned to stare at the seven pigs around us again, sulking or playing or trying to nuzzle one of us remaining kith.

Wait. Seven? There were Cosmo, Xoti, Maia, Tekēhu, Aloth, Serafen, and a pig that had not been there before. A pig that stood perfectly still to the side with its little butt toward me, tail in a bow. I grabbed it and turned it so I could see its face...and the myriad eyes looking at me. It grinned a too-wide grin that wasn’t the grin of a pig at all.

I had killed the avatar of Rymrgand on the Ice Floe and lived to tell the tale. Cursing under my breath, I wondered --

Would the same be true if I turned Wael’s one here into sausage?

**Author's Note:**

> Unbeta'd; I have no PoE friends. You could totally wipe that single solitary tear off my face by leaving kudos on your way out, though.


End file.
